Thanks to the wonderful app store that Apple provides for us iPhone customers, newer and better apps are created almost weekly. One of these apps, Stanza, can literally turn your iPhone into an eReader that literally rivals Amazon’s expensive Kindle.
In this episode, I show you just how easy it is to download Stanza and begin reading AND BUYING books, magazines, newspapers (most are free) through Stanza. As I say in this episode, make sure you read a few pages on your iPhone and I promise you will get used to it.
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MMS 43: Turning iPhone into a Kindle (eReader) from Jeff McCord on Vimeo
January 4th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Nice podcast, and good to see reading on the iPhone getting more attention.
While it’s nice that you covered Stanza, it’s far from the only (or even, in some circumstances, the best) e-book reading application available for the iPhone. It’s the one you want to use if you’re reading in the ePub format—but for other formats, other readers are superior.
The other readers I would recommend are:
eReader – The free e-book reading application from Fictionwise/eReader.com (formerly Palm Digital Media, formerly Peanut Press). This is for reading books you buy from the Fictionwise or eReader.com stores. (While Fictionwise did license the use of the eReader format to Stanza, Stanza doesn’t implement all of the eReader format’s formatting rules yet, so eReader books will still look much better on eReader. And it’s free, so why NOT have both?)
Bookshelf or BookshelfLT – Bookshelf costs $10. BookshelfLT is free, but has an ad banner and a 10-book-at-a-time limit. Either way, this is the very best reader out there for reading Mobipocket formatted books (as long as the books are not encumbered by DRM). Why spend $10 on a reader when Stanza is free? you might ask. Two reasons. First of all, Stanza’s handling of anything except ePub format books outright sucks. Try to load an HTML or Mobipocket book into Stanza through the desktop app, and what you get is something with all formatting gone—including bold and italic emphasis. Thanks but no thanks.
Second, Bookshelf includes integration with the Baen Webscriptions bookstore and the Baen Free Library. If you’ve bought Baen books, you can download them right to your phone from Bookshelf without having to go through a desktop app. And a lot of e-book fans are big into Baen already.
For a more full review of all the major iPhone e-book apps on the market, check out
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/12/11/iphone-e-book-review-v20/
Keep up the good work!
January 4th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
[...] via Twitter from @Stanza_Reader: a video blog entry singing the praises of Stanza, comparing iPhone + Stanza quite favorably to the Kindle. In the five [...]
January 4th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
@Chris -
Thank you so much for the great feedback and the suggestions to other eReaders. I appreciate the link!
March 8th, 2009 at 1:21 am
Hello. Great job. This is a great post. Thanks!
June 1st, 2009 at 7:07 am
Great list. I recommend a lot of these applications to my friends all the time.